Sunday, April 15, 2007

I am currently a member of only two fee-charging writers organisations, having recently joined EPIC prior to attending this years convention--and having recently renewed my membership of Romance Writers of New Zealand. I am also a member of free groups including the Erotic Authors Association and Speculative Romance. I have long considered joining RWA but each time I am reaching for my check book they do something that puts me off. Ditto on my dithering over subscribing to Romantic Times now that both my local news agents have stopped carrying it. The way in which erotic romance titles are being reviewed and the ban on gay romance keeps giving me a vibe that I am just not TSoP (their sort of people) despite my very regular purchases from the romance shelves, multiple romance publications and lifelong support of the genre.

My thinking is this. Membership fees are a tangible support of an organisation in return I must receive either tangible benefits worth the money, or I need to feel I want to support the group for its ideals and benefits to others. Currently that means the only subscription fee I intend to keep paying is to RWNZ. As an ex-pat I don't get a lot of tangible benefits but I strongly support the way in which they represent romance writing in New Zealand. This is a country strongly oriented towards literary fiction of a certain type, and genre writers need collectives such as RWNZ which all but vibrates with positive energy and is stuffed full of successful multi-published authors. As soon as I am back there I will be attending local chapter and national meetings. I also had that joyful of experience of asking whether they accept writers of gay romance--the experience where one is met with a response of total bemusement as to why they wouldn't.

But I am very curious to know which organisations other erotic romance writers have joined and whether they have felt the tangible or intangible benefits were worth the time or money invested. Which groups do you think we should link to as resources for novice writers?

[NEWS] EPIC passed all recent amendment by a vote of about 20% of the membership. This includes allowing writers of short fiction to join and allowing publishers to have voting rights.

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comments:

EPIC is a must, for me. I recently allowed my membership in RWA to expire. No tangible benefit for me & no desire to support the organization. I'm still a member of Romantic Times, but that too is subject to change when my membership is due for renewal.

Ohh, I didn't know of that NZ group, I think I'll look them up. The way our green card application's going I might be able to attend in person sooner, rather than later.

I don't belong to anything bar EPIC. I've been tossing up RWA, but all that money to potentially only belong to an online chapter, I cold better spend that advertising. But they do say the 'networking' is worth it - at this point I have no clue.

I'm a member of one group - the Erotic Authors Association. I don't really see myself as a "romance" writer so I never bothered with the romance groups. Lately I'm moving more into "erotica" rather than "erotic romance" so I'm fine with just EAA.

yeah..I know "romance" vs. "erotic romance" is just a matter of semantics. Still I don't really see my writing as belonging to the Romance/RWA market.

Not OT: I still haven't figured out whether my writings have any connection with genre romance. It's hard for me to tell, because I've never read any m/m romance works outside of the slash and gayfic worlds, nor have I read any m/f romance works (other than Mary Stewart's and Diana Gabaldon's novels). From the relative lack of interest that folks in the romance world have shown to my writings, I'm guessing I'm probably more in the specfic/gay/eroticlit world, even though a lot of what I write is romantic.

Because of that, I've never had any interest in joining a romance organization. I dearly wish a gay literature organization existed for writers. I lost interest in SFWA (the organization for professional science fiction and fantasy writers) a while back, and the conversations going on at SFWA's LJ right now make me feel that it wouldn't be the right organization for me.

What I'd *really* love is an organization for professional original slash/femslash/yaoi/yuri writers.

I think there's so much crossover between literary erotica and romance that you don't need to worry about that. Practically everything going on in the literary erotica world ends up being reported in places you'd be looking at anyway, like ERWA and Queerwriters.com.

The only part of the erotica world that's *really* off the charts, in terms of news reaching the literary erotica world, is the skin magazines. That's because they don't put out calls for submission. What's going on with them is more likely to show up at porn blogs; for lack of time, I don't read those, because they're dominated by news of photography and film. However, for anyone brave enough to want to track what's going on there, I recommend the following links. (They're all adult links.) Kay may have more suggestions to make, as I gather s/he was working in this field for a while.

AVN. Het porn news.http://www.avn.com/

GayVN. Gay porn news.http://www.gayvn.com/

Guide for Gay Porn Surfers.http://bananaguide.com/html/indexweb.htm

Porn Film Info Links. Includes some sites that cover magazines.http://bananaguide.com/html/vodwebpornvid.htm

YNOT.com. A very nice resource site for adult Webmasters. Worth browsing through even if one is only interested in erotic romance, because they cover legal news related to adult sites more thoroughly than any other news organization.http://www.ynot.com/

Free Speech Coalition. Another site to watch for legal news. Folks in the romance world don't like to think about it, but bills aimed at hardcore porn sites can affect erotic romance sites too. This trade organization has been on the frontlines of fighting against bad legislation. http://www.freespeechonline.org/

In fact, now that I think of it, the organizations I'd most likely join would be ones that were fighting for free speech: FSC, American Civil Liberties Union (http://www.aclu.org/), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/), and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (http://www.ncsfreedom.org). Being able to write well won't do us a stick of good if the governments legislate away our right to publish our work.